Robert Plant: A Life (29 page)

“I never saw Doug Boyle light Robert up,” says Hughes. “He wanted something different, something non-standard. Francis Dunnery, on the other hand, was a very visceral guitarist and I watched him fire Robert quite strongly with his playing.”

“Francis Dunnery was spectacular,” Plant enthused to me. “A mad, crazy, tangential player. Do we really need prog-rock? Well, no, but if ‘Mad’ Frank plays like that . . . He’d say to me, ‘What’s this fucking “playing the blues” thing, Planty?’ I said, ‘Just listen to the Wolf,’ referring to Howlin’ Wolf. I told him, ‘Play how he sings.’ But then, he was also like all the guitarists I’ve played with—a foil.”

The album itself was not quite what Plant had intended, however. His new record label was expectant of a more commercial-sounding album from him, not a great artistic leap forward. Where he had talked in advance of doing an organic-sounding record, Chris Hughes’s forte was for bigger pop productions and he was as meticulous as Plant is impulsive.

Engineer Phill Brown, who had worked on “Stairway to Heaven” with Zeppelin, was brought in at the end of the sessions to mix the tracks. He recalls the process being a fraught one.

“Chris is a great producer but I didn’t like the way he did things,” says Brown. “You might spend ten hours just moving a hi-hat around. Robert would often disappear, announcing that he was going for a walk. He’d be gone for an hour, and then come back and say sarcastically, ‘Are we ready yet?’ I don’t think he liked the direction he was being taken in. I did a week on the record and then left. It wasn’t working for me.”

According to Hughes, “The thing with Robert is quite a lot of the time he didn’t really want to be told, he just wanted it to be an open runway for him to be amazing. I’ve learned over the years that certain artists seek your advice and others want your approval. Robert just wanted to get on with it. He’s quite impatient.”

Fate of Nations
gave some insight into Plant’s private life. One of the more wistful tracks on the album, “29 Palms,” was said to be about Alannah Myles, though as always he would not be drawn to admit to as much. On it, he sang of “a fool in love, a crazy situation.” More affecting than this was “I Believe,” a lovely song that addressed the death of his first-born son Karac with heartbreaking candour. “Big fire, on top of the hill, a worthless gesture and last farewell,” Plant intoned as if singing a lullaby. “Tears from your mother, from the pits of her soul. Look at your father, see his blood run cold.” This was the most he had ever given away of himself.

“When you spend time with an artist you see things on a rawer level,” reflects Chris Hughes. “You see it all—the bullishness, but also the fragilities and the frailness. He talked quite a bit about the Wilson sisters. Nothing I can remember specifically, just the fact that they were quite a force.

“The thing with Robert is he’s very, very sociable and charismatic, but he doesn’t operate in the way that most people do. In terms of what he wants to do and who he wants to spend time with, he really does just please himself. He can go wandering off down to the bus stop and meet a girl, and the next thing you know he’ll have brought her back to the studio with him for a cup of tea. His interest in girls was ever present, but that’s OK.”

Although
Fate of Nations
was meant to court the mainstream, it came into a world where the blockbuster records were louder and more overly angst-ridden. These included Pearl Jam’s second album,
Vs
,
Siamese Dream
by Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana’s
In Utero
, this last record marking the ending of their—and grunge rock’s—brief reign, and doing so with a howl from the abyss.

In the States in particular Plant was pushed out to the fringes,
Fate of Nations
barely scraping in to the Top 40 there. Even though he put a brave face on this, it was a body blow and one every bit as painful to him as the failure of
Shaken ’n’ Stirred
had been eight years before.

Plant went back out on tour in April 1993. His stock had declined so sharply that he was opening for the American singer Lenny Kravitz on a run of European dates that summer. Kravitz had cribbed his entire act from Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and others, and was fifteen years Plant’s junior.

The shame was that this touring band was as capable as any he had had as a solo performer. Guitarist Francis Dunnery joined him, alongside bassist Charlie Jones and a young British drummer, Michael Lee, who had grown up idolising John Bonham. The shows were strong and Plant in great voice, although he had a succinct enough explanation for this being the case.

“I sing better than I did because there’s less powders going up me hooter,” he informed Deborah Frost of
Spin
. “It’s very difficult to give myself wholeheartedly,” he added, “but when I do, as I have to this group of musicians, then I’m vulnerable. My feeling of vulnerability is as acute as my power is.”

Rubbing salt in his wounds was the fact that Jimmy Page had just then had an album in the U.S. Top Ten. Harder still for him to take,
Coverdale·Page
paired the guitarist with ex-Deep Purple and Whitesnake singer David Coverdale, a kind of preening parody of Plant. Plant was scathing about it.

“Well, that record certainly trumped my samples,” he huffed to me, five years later. “I burbled out all sorts of garbage about it but it seems rather cute looking back.”

Page, who like Plant was also now being managed by Bill Curbishley, was unapologetic, admitting he’d done the record instead of a Zeppelin reunion. Speaking to me at the time, he said: “I was going through a totally frustrating and fruitless period so it was good just to be able to find a singer. I haven’t spoken to Robert about it.

“You’ve got to take into account here that 1991 was a year off for all of us. Jonesy had a couple of arrangements to do but that wasn’t going to take him a full year. I certainly didn’t have anything on and Robert had nothing to do. So really, the whole path was open for the three of us to come together but Robert just didn’t want to do it. After that I just thought, ‘This is just a total waste of time.’ ”

Page’s association with Coverdale was nonetheless short-lived. Plant’s tour rolled on into the States that September, where he’d had to downscale from arenas to theaters. During the course of it, he was approached by MTV with the offer of doing one of its
MTV Unplugged
shows. The popular franchise, for which artists performed an exclusive acoustic set, had given a career boost to such long-in-the-tooth stars as Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton. It seemed to offer Plant just the shot in the arm he needed.

From the off he was of a mind to do something different within the format. When he had been in Paris earlier in the year he had asked the French producer Martin Meissonnier to work up some North African-sounding drones and loops for him, and he was keen to follow up on these. His manager Bill Curbishley, on the other hand, was more intent upon maximising the impact of the proposed show. Sensing the perfect opportunity to bring two of his clients back together, he suggested to Plant that he bring Page on board for it.

The two men met up in Boston that November to discuss the idea, Page flying in to see Plant’s show at the city’s Orpheum Theater. After the gig Plant handed Page the tapes he had received back from Meissonnier. The complexities of their relationship are such that every gesture is open to interpretation, not least by the two of them. In this instance Page read Plant’s act as a test.

“He had these loops and it was, ‘Let’s see if Jimmy can come up with anything. Or is he about to get in the limousine with David Coverdale?’ No, I’m fine with a challenge,” Page told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
. “It was interesting getting together with Robert again. It’s apparent that the third [Zeppelin] album, where you have the emphasis on acoustic, was more attractive to him as time went on, rather than the more hardcore elements. Whereas I’d jump off a roof into that—naked.”

Negotiations went on, weeks stretching into months. Plant rounded off the
Fate of Nations
tour in South America at the beginning of the following year. He came home and sunk into a depression, brooding on the state of his career and putting on weight, as he tended to do when at a low ebb. He seemed inert, unable to decide what to do next. He was still unsure about working again with Page, feeling the ghosts and the guilt stirring.

He went to see his old friend Benji LeFevre and asked his advice. LeFevre told him not to sign anything he could not walk away from.

“I also said I thought he owed it to himself, and to Maureen and to Karac as well, to see if he could resolve any issues within him,” says LeFevre. “Though I was surprised it was even an option. Having seen and heard Pagey playing at a couple of gigs with Robert, it had been terribly disappointing.

“Plus, the whole Zeppelin thing was a textbook on how to perpetuate the myth. They never did any press and then they didn’t get back together again. That’s fucking smart. Because it will never, ever be as good as it was.”

Finally, Plant made up his mind. Just as he had done after
Shaken ’n’ Stirred
he fell back on his safest bet. In April 1994, six months on from their initial meeting, he and Page joined each other on stage again at a tribute concert for their old blues mentor, Alexis Korner, in the East Midlands spa town of Buxton.

“It was good to get back together being mates,” Page told me. “A lot of water had gone under the bridge.”

Although if either he or Plant expected their passage from then on to be a smooth one they were to be disappointed.

17

GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES

It was like trying to give birth to an elephant from a sheep.

On April 5, 1994 Nirvana’s singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain shot himself dead at his home in Seattle. In the note he left behind Cobain quoted a Neil Young lyric: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Yet it was the line that preceded these words in Young’s song “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” that best captured the essence of that year—“Rock and roll is here to stay.”

Nothing reverberated through 1994 so much as the sounds and sense of the ’60s and ’70s, revived by their original creators or reclaimed by newer artists. The latest voice of a generation gone so shockingly, it was almost as though a balance had needed to be struck. The remaining Beatles regrouped to complete a track John Lennon had never finished recording with them, “Free as a Bird.” The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and the Eagles all toured, the latter branding their comeback trek “Hell Freezes Over,” since they had once said it would be that long before they would play together again. The Fillmore reopened in San Francisco and someone even had the bright idea of staging a second Woodstock festival, corporate sponsors and all.

Britpop took hold in the U.K., its roots embedded in the ’60s, Oasis being cast as the Stones to Blur’s Beatles, even though it was the former that sounded like the Fab Four and the latter better resembled the Kinks. On their
Second Coming
album, the Stone Roses from Manchester took their cues from Led Zeppelin, their guitarist John Squire very evidently in thrall to Page. Fittingly, two months before that record Page and Plant had released their first album together in more than fifteen years, although in their case this was not just a recycling of the past but a fresh spin on it.

After appearing at the Alexis Korner tribute gig that April, the two of them had begun working with each other on the loops that Plant had received from French producer Martin Meissonnier. Out of these they fashioned a new track, a seductive drone they called “Yallah.” Far removed from the self-conscious sound of much of Plant’s solo work to that point, it tapped back into the roving spirit of Zeppelin’s most exotic moments. It also set the tone for what Plant intended for his and Page’s
MTV Unplugged
performance, which was to take Zeppelin’s music to foreign parts, using the folk music of North Africa as their vehicle.

“I’m certainly a lot different to the guy who sang on
In Through the Out Door
and it meant that we would be working together in a different form of partnership,” Plant later told Mat Snow of
Mojo
. “The whole idea of being able to brandish the Arab link was so important to me and really crucial. If you don’t modify it or present it in hushed tones, but mix it the way we are, a couple of questionable characters of ill repute, then you make a totally different form.”

It was not just with regard to the music that Plant was now taking the lead. Page had harbored hopes that John Paul Jones would be involved in the project but Plant dismissed them.

“If we hadn’t started with the loops, then we’d have begun as a four-piece, which would have been a bit ‘roll of the barrel’ for me,” he reasoned to Snow. “Apart from the fact that it would virtually be Led Zeppelin and then the next person you start talking about is John Bonham, which is just so cheesy and ridiculous . . . Personally, I don’t want to bring too much attention to the past, beyond the fact we’re old fuckers who can still do it and have a history.”

Of course, in reuniting with Page and doing Zeppelin songs, in whatever guise, Plant was having his cake and eating it. Backed by his own most recent rhythm section, bassist Charlie Jones and drummer Michael Lee, Plant started rehearsing with Page for the broadcast. They took over the upstairs room of the King’s Head, a pub in Fulham in West London. To assist them Plant first reached out to Ed Shearmur, a twenty-eight-year-old soundtrack composer and arranger who had been educated at Eton and had worked with Eric Clapton and Pink Floyd.

His next recruit was Hossam Ramzy, an Egyptian percussionist and composer. Ramzy had previously collaborated with Peter Gabriel on
Passion
, Gabriel’s gripping soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese film
The Last Temptation of Christ
. That project was a template for the vision Plant now had for blending musical cultures, and he charged Shearmur and Ramzy with pulling off the same magic act for him and Page. Ramzy put together an ensemble of Egyptian musicians, drawing them from London’s vibrant Arab club scene, with Shearmur acting as their arranger.